Not Emo! Gothic!

[Azazel]

I've seen a few people often mention the Gothic games in passing in threads here. Since I'm not sure how well my machine will run DMoM&M I'm wondering what kind of gameplay people have found them to have and which really is the better title? Reviews seem to favour Gothic 2 over 3, but then that can sometimes point to the age of the title rather then the later ones really being worse...

[Sky]

I just played Gothic 2 Gold at the end of last year, it still holds up (with a couple tweaks for view distance and high quality rendering, search is your friend). I've only just started 3, but it's a system hog on my higher end machine, and I was still tweaking performance when I sent my gpu back. Each seems to have a distinct flavor to it, which is pretty amazing imo. I played Gothic 2 as a paladin and Gold as a mage, the Gold version adds quite a bit to the game. The game is definitely quirky, the old menus and inventory were weird, though not bad if you got used to them.

I won't have a definitive idea about 3 for a while, I want to really stretch it out and get into it before I pass judgement. Given that I've played both previous titles through twice, I'll have a good idea about the third at some point.

[Tebonas]

I played all three and I would definitely rate Gothic 2 over Gothic 3.

3 just felt dumbed down, or as marketing would likely call it streamlined for mass appeal. It still is a good game once the boars of doom are patched out (there is a combat "feature" that lets animals that get the hit on you slaughter you at every level because they basically stunlock you. It lead to ridiculous situations like you taking down a demon that destroyed a whole city, turn a corner and get slaughtered by an animal).

i would play both, but if I had to choose I'd choose 2.

[Rithrin]

Gothic 2 is a pretty darn fun game. You have to get used to how combat works, though. I kept getting beat up in my first couple of fights, and then I fell off something and died. There was no autosave so I gave up for a while after that. But I came back and pushed through. The storyline was among the better ones, especially if you've played the original Gothic since you see a lot of old characters and such. Their skill system I thought was very nice and allowed a good amount of customization. They added a nice touch by making your combat animations evolve with the more skill points you put into specific skills. I started off clumsily pointing my crossbow in a direction and shooting it, to bracing the crossbow against my shoulder, to kneeling down while shooting, etc as I training in my crossbow skill which I thought added a nice touch. They let you make a lot of major decisions which change how you go about the main storyline so replay value is up a bit. There's a lot of cool places you can find if you decide to go explore. And just make sure you edit the ini to give you health/mana potion hotkeys since they aren't enabled by default.

Gothic 3 went a different direction. You continue as the same guy from the second game and meet up with characters back from 1 and 2 again, but this one seems way more sandboxish. They just dump you in the world with a tutorial battle and a basic storyline quest. Unlike Gothic 2 with only one real town, there's probably 14 or 15 and about half of them are castle sized. Four or five main factions that you basically have to decide between a couple of them, especially towards the end. The combat system isn't nearly as good as 2, in my opinion, since it starts to devolve into a giant attack spam fest instead of the methodical, fencing style fighting they were shooting for. Its a great idea, you have a light attack, a strong attack, a block, a dodge, a stab, a knockdown, but all the NPCs wipe out your stamina in a couple hits (You can't block with no stamina), knock down/stun lock you to the point where you literally can't do anything, and usually outnumber you by a lot, so the combat sort of falls short. Magic is very impressive and fun, though. Unrelated to gameplay, they made their villages and cities amazingly well. You'll see people sitting and talking around fires, chopping wood, cooking, reading books, creating potions, smithing, sharpening their weapons, sleeping in their homes at night, standing guard, walking about the city, sometimes when NPCs move past eachother they'll stop and have a chat, the list goes on. All of that made for wonderful ambiance and make cities feel like cities (MMOs could learn a thing or two from this). Though just like Gothic 2, there is some clunkly stuff (using potions, eating, dual weapons, etc) that will take a while to get used to but ultimately isn't that bad. There's different endings for the game, all radically different and all pretty final, so I hope this doesn't mean the Gothic series is done...